Julie in GA Posted February 24, 2015 Share Posted February 24, 2015 Okay, grammar nerds, I need your help! Can the object of a preposition have a complement? Here's the sentence: "Webster gave a series of lectures which were published under the title Dissertations on the English Language." The italicized portion of the sentence is what I'm wondering about. Is this a complement, renaming "title"? I don't think it could be an appositive, because it is needed to complete the meaning of the sentence and/or the grammatical structure. Appositives can be left out w/o changing the structure of the sentence. So, the only other option I can think of is that the title in italics could be another prepositional object, with the "understood" preposition of going on the slanted line in the diagram. (i.e. "....under the title (of) Dissertations...."). Anyone wanna tackle this? Follow-up question: If I had a copy of Descriptive English Grammar, would all my problems be solved? Thanks! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
EndOfOrdinary Posted February 24, 2015 Share Posted February 24, 2015 I was thinking appositive as well, as that is normally what I consider to be the names of already established nouns. In Latin it would be considered a second accusative which is allowed with words concerning "making", "naming", or "choosing". The second accusative is also called a predicate accusative or an object complement. My Latin grammar is better than my English grammar. (I learned Latin from scary nuns, but English in public school.) So often I go back to the Latin. It sounds like it could be secondary compliment if you went with Latin. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Julie in GA Posted February 24, 2015 Author Share Posted February 24, 2015 Does Latin have secondary complements? Also, the word "title" would be in the ablative case, right? It's not a direct object. If it were, then what follows would definitely be an object complement, as in the sentence "They named their baby Jane." I think I can concede that it's an appositive, but something doesn't seem quite right about it. It seems too essential, and I thought that you could remove an appositive from a sentence w/o affecting it's structure, or central meaning. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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